ABSTRACT
The perestroika period, leading up to the collapse of the USSR, was in large part characterized by an influx of Western goods, attitudes and popular culture. The latter permeated all forms of Soviet cultural production, including cinema, where Western rock music produced a surge in box-office revenue, which was often at odds with the traditional prescriptions of Soviet ideology. This process of gradual Westernization of Soviet visual media also resulted in establishing new popular heroes, most notably the late-Soviet rock star, a cinematic fixture that persisted into the post-Soviet period. Through a re-examination of the cinematic legacies of Vladimir Vysotskii, Andrei Makarevich and Viktor Tsoi, this chapter traces the shifts in the representation of rock-n-roll stardom in Soviet film from the 1960s to the early 2000s in order to demonstrate the gradual displacement of the myth of the ‘redemptive’ Soviet rock hero in favour of constructing a narrative of historical martyrdom; reframing the rock star as the cultural victim, rather than hero, of his time.
